Tanzania recently hosted the Southern Africa Development
Community (SADC) Summit and, as part of the resolutions, the leaders
condemned sanctions against Zimbabwe. They agreed to make October 25,
2019 a “day of political action against sanctions” in solidarity with
Zimbabwe.
The ruling Zimbabwe African
National Union Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), celebrated the resolution as a
victory. But, as the summit was going on, in Zimbabwe, the opposition
had organised national protests, which were brutally stopped by the
police backed by the military. While the leaders in Tanzania revived the
liberation movement solidarity that historically existed in the
pan-African project to liberate Zimbabwe, the people of Zimbabwe
themselves were protesting the worsening socio-economic conditions.
While
showing solidarity with the political class in Zimbabwe, the citizens
have been abandoned. It is likely that the country will face more social
unrest.
LIBERATION
The
leaders meeting in Tanzania did not pay adequate attention to the way
Zimbabwe’s crisis has been manufactured by nationalist elite, who have
abandoned the liberation project of transformation and are now focused
on an accumulation project, which has killed the country’s economic
prospects.
No amount of “liberation
solidarity” is going to rescue a leadership that is imploding. The
International Monetary Fund has said that Zimbabwe’s economy will
experience negative growth. Power generation has almost ground to a
halt, as electricity is now only available for a few hours at night.
Incomes for the working class have collapsed so badly that the average
worker now earns almost $40 a month and unions are threatening strikes.
Inflation has been spiralling out of control
and close to five million Zimbabweans have crossed the borders into
South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Mozambique. Others have gone to
Australia, Europe and the US. If there were no crisis in printing
passports, more citizens would leave.
But
this crisis cannot be explained by the noise over sanctions. The
economic collapse can be blamed on the way the nationalist-liberation
movement in the country has degenerated because of corruption,
incompetence and unwillingness to promote economic and political
reforms.
After the removal of Robert
Mugabe in November 2017, the military has become a very powerful
political institution. Just before Mugabe left, the Commander of the
Zimbabwe Defence Forces issued a warning that as a “result of
squabbling” within the ruling party, “there has been no meaningful
development in the country for the past five years” and that the
economic impasse had “ushered in more challenges to the Zimbabwean
populace.”
Increasingly the military
has been dabbling in the electoral landscape in the country and openly
supporting one faction against another in the ruling party.
MILITARY INVOLVEMENT
While
the involvement of the military in politics can be traced to the early
1980s, it intensified after 2000, when the ruling political class faced a
formidable challenge from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) then
led by the late Morgan Tsvangirai.
In
2008, the military took complete charge of the ruling party machinery
and engaged in operations across the country to make sure that Mugabe
was retained in the election. The election was so bloody that the
opposition leader fled, hundreds of opposition members were brutalised,
the Africa Union and SADC refused to endorse the results and the mayhem
only ended when a government of national unity was formed.
Since
then, the military has continued its march into civilian institutions.
Men — and a few women — from the army, especially those associated with
the liberation army of the 1970s, are now occupying very powerful
positions across the bureaucracy.
Vice-President
Kembo Mohadi was in the military in the 1970s; the other
vice-president, Constantine Chiwenga was recently the Commander of the
Zimbabwe Defences Force (ZDF). The ministers of Agriculture and Foreign
Affairs are former army generals. What this means is that while Zimbabwe
has constitutional democracy institutions like parliament, judiciary
and holds periodic elections, the real political power now lies
elsewhere — in what has been called the “junta” or the “system.”
This
is a network of very powerful military elites who make decisions that
override civilian institutions and the result has been catastrophic on
several fronts. Routinely, the military and its resources are deployed
against citizens and the election campaign of 2018 was run by a
political commissar, who is a former army general.
SANCTIONS AND THE RULING CLASS
The
ruling political class has been very quick to point to the sanctions
imposed by the US as a stumbling block to economic transformation. There
is no doubt that the sanctions have restricted the ability of Zimbabwe
to access financial facilities from the likes of the IMF and the World
Bank. But the story goes further than this.
Zimbabwe’s
growth prospects have been hampered by widespread corruption. When the
army generals placed Mugabe under house arrest and then he subsequently
resigned, they cited corruption around the president as a cause of
political instability in the country. What has since emerged is that for
the past four decades in Zimbabwe, the ruling elites have inserted
themselves in every corner of the economy – the political class is now
the business class.
Officials from
the Ministry of Finance recently admitted, in parliament, that the
ministry had irregularly disbursed $3 billion. Year in, year out, the
Auditor-General has diligently pointed to how state resources have been
pillaged and nothing has been done. The Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption
Commission is chaired by Loice Matanda-Moyo, the wife of Foreign Affairs
minister Sibusiso Moyo.
It was
significant that the SADC Summit was held in Tanzania. First, Tanzania’s
founding president Mwalimu Julius Nyerere was a pan-Africanist who
maintained solidarity with the liberation project in Africa. Second,
post-colonial Tanzania has remained politically and socially stable,
with leadership changes, and has escaped the scourge of regionalist and
ethnic movements that have torn apart most independent African
countries. Third, and most importantly, Tanzania, especially the
University of Dar es Salaam, provided intellectual space for
pan-Africanists, Marxists, nationalists and radical activists of all
shades who challenged colonialism and apartheid. So notable was Tanzania
in the pan-African solidarity that Dr Walter Rodney made it his home
when he was researching, teaching, and wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, which became a seminal text in understanding Africa’s underdeveloped political economy.
But
Africa has changed and the nationalist movements have been in power for
a while now. The nationalist movement has been in power in Zimbabwe for
almost four decades and they have made a mess of things. Unless the
regional leaders confront the real problem of militarism in Zimbabwe’s
politics, the cycle of repression and protest will continue and more
Zimbabweans will continue fleeing poverty. As Nelson Mandela once said,
the Zimbabwe crisis is a leadership crisis.
Tinashe L. Chimedza is an associate director of the Institute for Public Affairs in Zimbabwe
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